Everyone should stop Facebook. Everyone is not going to stop using Facebook this week. That’s OK. There’s a middle ground between deleting your account forever and between spending all of your waking, earthly hours refreshing your Facebook feed. And we should be telling our relatives and friends about that middle ground, instead of telling them they have to stop using Facebook right away. We can counter the sense of helplessness that many people feel about their relationship to Facebook and to other social media platforms – but we’re going to need to do it in an incremental, careful way.

Facebook seemed invulnerable for a very long time, but this latest scandal, on top of all the others, actually seems to have wounded it: Facebook’s stock valued dropped by as much as 8 percent in the US and the UK, and Mark Zuckerberg had lost already $9 billion of his net worth by Tuesday. The leviathan has been hit, there’s blood in the water, and it’s easy for us privacy paranoiacs to feel like Captain Ahab. For the first time that we can remember, there’s an opportunity to take Facebook down, or at least to weaken it by reducing its user base.

“You’ve got to delete your Facebook profile, it’s the only way!” we tell our friends and relatives, waving around our harpoons. Whereupon our friends and relatives smile (so as not to provoke us) and back away. They don’t want to delete Facebook entirely, or maybe they can’t due to their job, or because it’s the only way to communicate with their families. It’s not like it matters, they think. Facebook already has all my information.

The Captain Ahab approach is not a good way to get people to alter their social media habits, and it’s not a good way to convince people to better protect their privacy from companies like Facebook. When we get all Captain Ahab, we’re forgetting some important realities about human beings and how most human beings feel about Facebook.

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!

First: we forget that most people don’t know much about how their Facebook data is used and abused. Endless news stories about the evils of Facebook may fill them with unease and distrust, but they’re not getting much good information on what to do about it. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 47% of Americans lacked confidence in their knowledge of what companies actually do with their personal data. This 2016 survey from the UK found that while 74% of Internet users believed that they adequately protected their online data, only 28% of respondents had actually turned off location tracking on the platforms they use, and only 31% had changed their social media privacy settings. This confusion is in part because Facebook and other social media companies have done a bang-up job of obfuscating what they’re up to: another recent study found that Facebook’s privacy policy became much less transparent and much harder for mere mortals to understand in the decade from 2005 to 2015.

Your conflicted Facebook-using friends and relations are living in what frustrated security researchers call the “privacy paradox”: most people will swear up and down that privacy is important to them, and then will continue to share their personal information widely on the Internet. This is not because they are stupid. It is because they believe that they live in a dark, howling Internet panopticon from which they cannot escape. (I’m exaggerating, but only kinda). This 2016 focus-group study found that young people were aware of the risks of sharing their information online. They just didn’t think they could do anything about those risks: they felt that “privacy violations are inevitable and opting out is not an option.” They’ve fallen prey to privacy cynicism, which is defined rather succinctly by these researchers as ” an attitude of uncertainty, powerlessness and mistrust towards the handling of personal data by online services, rendering privacy protection behavior subjectively futile.”

I met a traveler in an antique…look, you get it, hint hint.

Many people also feel powerless because they think Facebook is unkillable. The average person viewed Facebook as a doofy college-kid rumor service back in 2007: now, most see it as a bit like an unstoppable, inescapable international hive-mind. I’m sure Facebook would be just fine with being viewed sometime decades hence as an inscrutable but appeasable deity: provide your data tribute, and the crops will flourish! Withold your tribute and face its wrath! Facebook knows no past or present or death!

Changing your relationship with the Internet and social media is particularly difficult because they are such fundamental parts of modern life: abstinence isn’t really an option. You can live a normal, productive life without WoW or cigarettes, but it’s just about impossible to live normally without the Internet. It can also be hard to go without Facebook: many people do need it for their jobs, or to stay attached to relatives who may not be as up for getting off Facebook as they are.

So what can we ask people to do? What are some realistic, relatively easy things that people can do to better protect their privacy? How can people scale back their Facebook usage and the data they share with Facebook, without deleting their profile entirely? Here’s some suggestions.

Figure out the motivation behind your compulsion to use Facebook. “Cyber psychologist” John Suler (what a great job title) suggested this type of scrutiny in a Quartz article: “Is it a need for dependency, to feel important and powerful, to express anger, to release oneself from guilt? In compulsive behaviors, people are expressing such needs but rarely does the activity actually resolve those needs.” If you know why you’re spending hours combing through your colleague’s second-cousin’s dog photos, you’ll have a better sense of what you need to do to stop. You can also try restriction apps, like Self Control – they’ve helped me reduce my own “pigeon pecking at a button” behavior immensely.

Turn off location sharing. I do not use location sharing on any of my devices. There is no good reason for Facebook to know where you are.

Turn off Facebook’s platform feature. This feature is what allows third-party apps and other websites to integrate with Facebook, and it’s also what permits these third-party apps to slurp up lots and lots of your data. Shut that sucker off. No, you won’t be able to play Farmville anymore, you deviant.

Review your third-party app settings. If you don’t want to take the nuclear option of turning off Facebook’s platform – though you really, really should – you can still review your third party app settings and revoke access to apps you distrust. (Don’t trust any of them). Buzzfeed has a good guide here. You should do this for all the social media sites you use, not just Facebook.

Stop liking things. “Likes” give Facebook useful information on how to advertise to you. Do not do that.

Delete as much information as you can possibly stand from your Facebook profile. Delete as many old posts as you can possibly stand. You can download your Facebook archive if you don’t want to lose those memories entirely.

Don’t get me wrong. We do not live in a perfect world. Us Captain Ahabs are not going to convince every Facebook user to rise up and delete their profile as one in a Glorious Attention Revolution, in which Facebook evaporates into a puff of dark and oily mist, and all the Facebook money is redistributed to the world’s privacy-loving children, and Mark Zuckerberg is forced to live in penitent exile in a hole in the forest on a very remote island. We are not going to harpoon this stupid privacy-hating white whale right now.

What we can do is slowly starve Facebook: by cutting down on our time using Facebook and the amount of information we share with it, we can reduce its ration of nutrient-rich data krill. Facebook’s advertisers are dependent on your attention and knowledge about you, and their job gets a lot harder if you provide less of it. By starving Facebook, we reduce its power over us and its power over our government and over our minds. It’s absolutely true that users can only do so much: we are going to need regulation with teeth to truly loosen Facebook’s grip over our societies. Still, we can help bring about that regulation and help alter how our communities approach Facebook by altering our own behavior and helping others do the same.

I don’t necessarily want Facebook to die (though I’m not sure I’d be very sad). I do want it to be humbled. I want Facebook and its leaders to realize that we do live in a world where actions have consequences, and where the actions of gigantic companies that control mind-exploding quantities of data have some of the most important consequences of all. We can do our small part to make this happen. In short: Facebook users of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but constant interaction with your racist uncle.